Infinite Progress: How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War

For years we’ve been inundated with bleak forecasts about the future. But in this electrifying new book, author Byron Reese debunks the pessimistic outlook as dangerous, and shows instead how technology will soon create a dramatically better world for every person on earth, beyond anything we have dared to imagine.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization

K. Eric Drexler is the founding father of nanotechnology - the science of engineering on a molecular level. In Radical Abundance, he shows how rapid scientific progress is about to change our world. Thanks to atomically precise manufacturing, we will soon have the power to produce radically more of what people want, and at a lower cost. The result will shake the very foundations of our economy and environment.

Evolving Ourselves

Why are conditions like autism, asthma, obesity, and allergies exploding at unprecedented rates? Why are we living longer, getting smarter, having far fewer kids? If Darwin were alive today, how would he explain this new world?

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact

New York Times, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Discover bestselling author Steven Kotler has written extensively about those pivotal moments when science fiction became science fact...and fundamentally reshaped the world. Now he gathers the best of his best, updated and expanded upon, to guide listeners on a mind-bending tour of the far frontier, and how these advances are radically transforming our lives.

Futurevision

The future is not what it used to be. In this volatile era, with the world changing rapidly, people are more curious than ever to know what lies ahead. Will relentless consumerism end up destroying our planet? Or can science and technology allow us to innovate our way out of trouble? Perhaps a greater social consciousness and community-based living will take over or, conversely, the competition for limited resources may result in everyone fighting for themselves.

Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter

As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The "theory of everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are.

Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things

We are now standing at the precipice of the next transformative development: The Internet of Things. Soon, connected technology will be embedded in hundreds of everyday objects we already use: our cars, wallets, watches, umbrellas, even our trash cans. These objects will respond to our needs, come to know us, and learn to think on our behalf. David Rose calls these devices - which are just beginning to creep into the marketplace - Enchanted Objects.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era

Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence. In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail - human-level intelligence.

Breakpoint: Why the Web Will Implode, Search Will Be Obsolete, and Everything Else You Need to Know About Technology Is in Your Brain

We are living in a world in which cows send texts to farmers when they're in heat, where the most valuable real estate in New York City houses computers, not people, and some of humanity's greatest works are created by crowds, not individuals. We are in the midst of a networking revolution - set to transform the way we access the world's information and the way we connect with one another. Studying biological systems is perhaps the best way to understand such networks, and nature has a lesson for us if we care to listen: Bigger is rarely better in the long run.

Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution

How do The Matrix, Avatar, and Tron reveal the future of existence? Can our brains recognize where "reality" ends and "virtual" begins? What would it mean to live eternally in a digital universe? Where will technology lead us in five, 50, and 500 years? Two innovative scientists explore the mystery and reality of the virtual and examine the profound potential of emerging digital technologies. Welcome to the future....

Virtually Human: The Promise - and the Peril - of Digital Immortality

Virtually Human explores what the not-too-distant future will look like when cyberconsciousness - simulation of the human brain via software and computer technology - becomes part of our daily lives. Meet Bina48, the world's most sentient robot, commissioned by Martine Rothblatt and created by Hanson Robotics.

The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future

In 1969, Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill began looking outward to space colonies as the new frontier for humanity's expansion. A decade later, Eric Drexler, an MIT-trained engineer, turned his attention to the molecular world as the place where society's future needs could be met using self-replicating nanoscale machines. These modern utopians predicted that their technologies could transform society as humans mastered the ability to create new worlds, undertook atomic-scale engineering, and, if truly successful, overcame their own biological limits.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

In a world of self-driving cars and big data, smart algorithms and Siri, we know that artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day. Though all these nifty devices and programs might make our lives easier, they're also well on their way to making "good" jobs obsolete. A computer winning Jeopardy might seem like a trivial, if impressive, feat, but the same technology is making paralegals redundant as it undertakes electronic discovery, and is soon to do the same for radiologists.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

In recent years, Google’s autonomous cars have logged thousands of miles on American highways and IBM’s Watson trounced the best human Jeopardy! players. Digital technologies — with hardware, software, and networks at their core — will in the near future diagnose diseases more accurately than doctors can, apply enormous data sets to transform retailing, and accomplish many tasks once considered uniquely human.

Epigenetics: The Ultimate Mystery of Inheritance

The burgeoning new science of epigenetics offers a cornucopia of insights - some comforting, some frightening. For example, the male fetus may be especially vulnerable to certain common chemicals in our environment, in ways that damage not only his own sperm but also the sperm of his sons. And it’s epigenetics that causes identical twins to vary widely in their susceptibility to dementia and cancer. But here’s the good news: unlike mutations, epigenetic effects are reversible. Indeed, epigenetic engineering is the future of medicine.

Coal, iron ore, and oil were the key productive assets that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Today data is the vital raw material of the information economy. The explosive abundance of this digital asset, more than doubling every two years, is creating a new world of opportunity and challenge. Data-ism is about this next phase, in which vast, Internet-scale data sets are used for discovery and prediction in virtually every field. It is a journey across this emerging world with people, illuminating narrative examples, and insights.

The Longevity Seekers: Science, Business, and the Fountain of Youth

People have searched for the fountain of youth everywhere from Bimini to St. Augustine. But for a steadfast group of scientists, the secret to a long life lies elsewhere: In the lowly lab worm. By suppressing the function of just a few key genes, these scientists were able to lengthen worms’ lifespans up to tenfold, while also controlling the onset of many of the physical problems that beset old age. As the global population ages, the potential impact of this discovery on society is vast - as is the potential for profit.

Nano: The Science of Nanotechnolgoy

It's the ultimate technology: nanotechnology - the attempt to build ordinary objects from the atoms up, molecule by molecule. So named because its building blocks are the smallest pieces of matter, nanotechnology will give us complete control over the structure of matter, allowing us to build any substance or structure permitted by the Laws of Nature. Placing atoms as if they were bricks, nano-machines could turn grass clippings into prime sirloins - directly, without cows.

Beyond: Our Future in Space

Beyond dares to imagine a fantastic future for humans in space - and then reminds us that we're already there. Human exploration has been an unceasing engine of technological progress, from the first homo sapiens to leave our African cradle to a future in which mankind promises to settle another world. Beyond tells the epic story of humanity leaving home - and how humans will soon thrive in the vast universe beyond the Earth.

In this provocative and optimistic rebuke to the catastrophists, Robert Bryce shows how innovation and the inexorable human desire to make things Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper is providing consumers with Cheaper and more abundant energy, Faster computing, Lighter vehicles, and myriad other goods. That same desire is fostering unprecedented prosperity, greater liberty, and yes, better environmental protection.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life

In 2010, scientists led by J. Craig Venter became the first to successfully create "synthetic life" - putting humankind at the threshold of the most important and exciting phase of biological research, one that will enable us to actually write the genetic code for designing new species to help us adapt and evolve for long-term survival. The science of synthetic genomics will have a profound impact on human existence, including chemical and energy generation, health, clean water and food production, environmental control, and possibly even our evolution.

The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones - Confronting a New Age of Threat

From drone warfare in the Middle East to digital spying by the National Security Agency, the US government has harnessed the power of cutting-edge technology to awesome effect. But what happens when ordinary people have the same tools at their fingertips? Advances in cybertechnology, biotechnology, and robotics mean that more people than ever before have access to potentially dangerous technologies that could be used to attack states and private citizens alike.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control.

Resource Revolution: How to Capture the Biggest Business Opportunity in a Century

What do shale gas, Elon Musk’s Tesla, and the global apparel chain Zara share in common? In Resource Revolution, management experts Stefan Heck and Matt Rogers describe how each in its own way exemplifies a resource revolution - a use of natural resources so effective it defies conventional wisdom and enables breakthrough performance where others see only limits and shortcomings.

Publisher's Summary

For years we’ve been inundated with bleak forecasts about the future. But in this electrifying new book, author Byron Reese debunks the pessimistic outlook as dangerous, and shows instead how technology will soon create a dramatically better world for every person on earth, beyond anything we have dared to imagine.

With the art of a storyteller, Reese synthesizes history, technology, and sociology into an exciting, fast-moving narrative that shows how technological change has had dramatic effects on humanity in the past. He then looks forward at the technological changes we know are coming - from genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, and many other fields - and explores how they will vastly increase wealth, prolong our lifespans, redefine human rights, and alter the social fabric of the world. Reese explains how the Internet, human ingenuity, and technological innovation will help us forever end the five historic plagues of human existence: ignorance, disease, poverty, hunger, and war. With a rational and researched optimism, Reese sees the future not as a world in a downward spiral, but as destined for progress beyond our imaginations. As Reese looks forward, he notes that “we are gaining speed, not winding down. We are blooming, not withering, as we leverage the greatest natural resource on the planet: the human mind.”

The future of Earth’s inhabitants has never been brighter. If you want to get excited about the future, then this is the book for you.

Byron Reese is a historian. In his latest work, Infinite Progress he sets a high bar for Internet and Technology. He spells out his optimism in his title “How the Internet and Technology will end ignorance, disease, poverty, hunger and war. Yikes! As a fellow Internet aficionado and technology practitioner, I just had to see what this was all about. In the first chapter I worked my way up the ladder of “optimism shock” – a kind of sugar shock, just without ingesting a ton of jelly beans.

The basis for Reese giving you his predictions are built on five principles: 1) futurists often get it wrong; 2) history can help us get it right; 3) internet technology + human ingenuity = infinite promise; 4) accelerating progress is inevitable; and, 5) the new renaissance has begun. Pretty heady stuff! Of these five principles there really is only one real premise three assertions and one dollop of hope. I really don’t think Reese made his argument in the end. But....

I have read other books in this genre, for example the "Next 100 Years" by George Friedman and this work has a place along side. I would have to say that spending 10 hours dwelling on things might go right instead of 10 hours of the things that have gone wrong was a refreshing change. Even if you don’t buy what Reese is selling, I give him credit for putting his message out there. If you have the time and want to hear some good, non-political, speculation give it a read.

Have you listened to any of Grover Gardner’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I have, which in my opinion is the best, and that's one reason why I've tried this book

Any additional comments?

No Peter Diamond or Steven Pinker, but all right. The world needs more optimists, but the author is almost dreaming, in my opinion. To say that there will be less war or less hunger in the future, I can easily see…but no war? The book is good, no doubt, but just not a master piece like Abundance. But I am glad that it is Grover Gardner that read it, makes it all worth the time to listen to.

I would definitely recommend this book. This book provides some really thought provoking ways of how the internet will be used in the future. You have to be an optimist to follow this book but it is a great read, entertaining, thought-provoking and inspiring. I can't wait for this future!

Infinite Progress places our time in the wide arc of history and how technology and global communication will transform our world through greater interdependency and economic growth. The author does not provide a timeline but rather argues transformational progress is well underway and accelerating. This positive future focused vision is based on a view of history and how these changes are well under way.

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